"My Big Fish Games" top members.

[ragdollsoft]

I'm curious if/how you guys know the top members of "My Big Fish Games". I searched google but could not find them...

[Matthew]

#1 TheDiamondGames / www.thediamondgames.com is run by my younger brother, Mark.

#3 LegacyGames / www.legacygames.com is a game developer (the Law & Order downloadable games).

#4 LastDayofWork / www.ldw.com is a game developer (Fish Tycoon, Virtual Villagers)

#7 gamezebo / www.gamezebo.com is a review site

#8 BadByte / www.pyramid-games.com is an affiliate marketer

I'm not sure who the others are. LDW is very new to the top 10--I believe they recently switched over to the PNP program around the time of the Amsterdam conference. They're piping all of their 1st-party sales of Virtual Villagers 2 through the affiliate program, too, which nets them 84% (hence the huge jump).

[zoombapup]

Try and get hold of the slides from the big fish presentation at the Casual Connect conference it had info on some of the top ones.

[ragdollsoft]

Thanks Matt.

I guess if you are serious about it you need to do a website and integrate mybigfish portions with frames like your bro and you did... though it seems to be quite a tough job :/

[Matthew]

It isn't a ton of work, although it depends how comfortable you are with web technologies. The new Big Fish PNP program includes some iframes and example PHP code for running a site, which can simplify the process (very similar to the iframes and WDK that Reflexive provide). There are a few options, though.

Mark runs TDG off Wordpress. He has a plethora of tools that turn the BFG/Reflexive XML feeds into Wordpress posts. The benefit here is that you get all of the Wordpress features automatically--RSS feeds, link structures, comments, etc. His site auto-updates from XML.

The new Flashbang site is also a BFG/Reflexive affiliate page. It runs off the XML feeds from both partners. We're using both to get a larger catalog; we're currently listing 786 games. It's custom-coded, which has both upsides and downsides. It's a lot more flexible, obviously, but I still need to do the work to enable user comments/reviews. It can be tricky to take in two feeds, too, because many games will come in on both (often with slight differences in their names). It only took two weeks to create the new site from scratch.

If you have any kind of traffic, especially casual users, there's a very compelling argument to launch a BFG PNP site. You could do well in the SERPs if you have an older domain with a lot of relevant backlinks. For us, we weren't releasing nearly enough of our own games to monetize our domain. The goal now is to do well enough 6 months out with BFG/etc income that we'll be able to fund development on indie projects. I'm confident we'll reach this goal sometime in 2007.

[electronicStar]

I think BigFish could communicate a bit more about the options available.

[ragdollsoft]

Another thing i dont get:

suppose i go to http://www.mygamespace.com/TheDiamondGames

then i go to Dream Day Wedding: learn more ( http://www.bigfishgames.com/downloads/dreamdaywedding/?afcode=afb26bb78ba6 )

here it tracks the affiliate code: afb26bb78ba6

Now suppose i click download ( http://www.bigfishgames.com/downloads/dreamdaywedding/download.html ): it asks for an email address. Is the address entered added to my referalls ("friends") list? If not, how do i benefit from having produced a download?

[ragdollsoft]

<why cant we delete our posts?>